No Flies On The U.S.:

In his recent article Flypaper:
A Strategy Unfolds, Andrew Sullivan trots out some confirming
evidence for the theory that the U.S. is pursuing a “flypaper
strategy” in Iraq — encouraging the Islamic terror
network to fight American soldiers there so they won't be attacking
American civilians here.

Mr. Sullivan's analysis is plausible. Plausible enough that my reaction
to the article, especially the last paragraph in which he urges Bush to
articulate the strategy as a way of scoring domestic political points. was:
“OK, you've demonstrated your cleverness. Now would you kindly
zip your lip before you undermine the strategy?”

The leaders of the Islamist terror network are certainly evil and
arguably insane (if only in the general way that all religious
believers are insane) but they're not stupid. If the
President of the United States got on network T.V. and yelled
“We have a flypaper strategy! We're encouraging all the world's
nut-jobs to attack us in Iraq so they won't attack us in the
U.S.”, just what do you suppose would be the result?

Would our favorite murderous ragheads nod agreeably, say
“Peachy, we'll play your game and keep attacking you where you
think you're strongest?” Or would they bend all their efforts
to ginning up another mass-murder in the U.S. just to prove they can
do it and the flypaper isn't working?

For anyone to talk about a flypaper strategy in public is
irresponsible. For Sullivan to urge that Bush should cop to it in
public in order to one-up his domestic opponents is beyond
irresponsible into idiotic and feckless. The President of the
U.S. would be profoundly derelict in his duty if he courted lethal
danger to American civilians by doing any such thing.

I'm normally a fan of Andrew Sullivan. His writing is witty if
occasionally a bit febrile, and he is clear-eyed on a handful of
subjects that normally induce rectocranial inversion in conservatives.
But today he should be ashamed of himself. He has engaged in the
exact same error he has excoriated in others, which is treating
the rest of the world as a mere backdrop to domestic American
political feuds.

And I have some advice for him: Mr. Sullivan, next time you feel
the urge to be clever in public, do us all a favor and ask yourself
how many innocent lives you might be endangering by running your
mouth. If the answer is more than zero, shut up!

posted by Eric at 11:33 PM

Wednesday, October 01, 2003

If Guns Are Outlawed, Outlaws Will Use Crossbows

Police in West Chester are looking for an assailant they believe used
a crossbow to shoot a pedestrian from a passing SUV.

The victim, a restaurant worker who was walking home along High
Street early Sunday morning, was shot in the stomach with a 16-inch
hunting arrow. He was released Wednesday from the University of
Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia.

Benito Vargas told police he was at the corner of High and Barnard
Streets at about 1 a.m. when he saw the white SUV's driver-side window
slide down, revealing the front part a crossbow just inside. Seconds
later, he was lying on the ground.

[...]

"This thing would be silent. You wouldn't hear any noise," West
Chester Detective Thomas Yarnall said. [...] Yarnall said the
shooting appeared random [...]

Gives a whole old meaning to the phrase "looking for a quarrel",
which in fact, originally referred to a crossbow bolt.

posted by Eric at 6:48 PM

Monday, September 29, 2003

Statism — Love It Or Leave It

For many years I've been seeing proposals for implementing
libertarian reforms that look superficially appealing and plausible,
but on closer examination run hard aground either on some pesky
reality of politics as it is or the extreme difficulty of waging a
successful revolution. Since I'm a libertarian,
you may well imagine that I find this annoying. How do we get there
from here?

For the first time, I think I've seen a path that is both
principled and practical. Not the whole path, but some firm steps
that both accomplish good in themselves and open up great
possibilities. And the best part is that it's a path most statists
can't object to, one that uses the premises of the existing federal
system to achieve a fair first test of libertarian ideas within that
system. Even opponents of libertarianism, if they are fair-minded,
should welcome this reality check. Libertarians should cheer it on
and join it.

I've had troubles with other libertarians recently. Too many have
retreated into isolationism in the face of a war with terrorism that I
do not believe we can or should evade. The isolationists judge that
empowering the State when we use it as an instrument of self-defense
has consequences for the long term that are more dangerous than
terrorists' aims are in the short term. I sympathize with this view,
but when all is said and done, Al-Qaeda shahids with backpack nukes
from the 'stans are more of a danger than John Ashcroft has ever been.
I have done my homework and if anything, I believe the U.S. Government
is understating the danger we face.

But the dangers of empowering the State to fight a necessary war
make it more, not less urgent that we pursue all possibilities for
libertarian reform at home. Now, I think I see a workable one. What
if, by perfectly legal and proper means, we could take over a small
American state and actually try out our ideas there?

Yes, I thought it was a crazy idea when I first heard it. An
entire state? How? But the Free State Project has
done the math. I've looked at their arguments and trend curves, and
I'm pretty much convinced. It can be done. We can do it. The
key is very simple; enough of us just have to move
there. Vote with our feet, and then vote in a bloc. And why
a state? Becausr that's the only intermediate level of government
with enough autonomy to make a good laboratory.

The Free State Project identified ten small states where 20,000
active libertarians would be a critically large voting bloc. They are
signing up libertarians and like-minded people to vote on the target
state and to move there when the group passes 20,000. The winning
state will be announced on 1st October; they've signed up about 5400
people so far, on a classic exponential growth curve with a six-month
doubling time that should get them there in late 2004.

What could be more American than migrating to a thinly-settled area
to experiment with liberty? And this time we won't have to kill off the
natives, because they're not going to be organizing any scalping parties.
Most of the states under consideration have a strong local
libertarian tradition, and none of them are going to look askance at
the sort of bright, hardworking, highly-skilled people most likely to
be pro-freedom activists.

Some people won't like this idea, though. The national media
establishment, which is statist down to its bones even in the few
crevices where it isn't leftist, will inevitably try to portray the
Free State migrants as a bunch of racist conservative redneck gun-nuts
(all these terms being effectively synonymous in the national media)
intent on turning the poor victim state into one gigantic Aryan
Nations compound (especially if it's Idaho, as it could be). Expect
network-news interviews with locals teary-eyed with worry that the
incomers will be hosting regular cross-burnings on the courthouse
lawn. Awkward little inconsistencies like the libertarian opposition
to drug laws, censorship, and theocracy will be ignored. This prospect
is especially ironic because, in most of the possible target states,
it is our lifestyle liberalism that is actually most likely to produce
a culture clash with the natives.

The more intelligent members of the political class won't like this
either. The brighter and better-able one is to extrapolate
second-and-third-order effects, the more likely the potential success
of libertarianism at a state level is likely to scare them —
conservatives nearly as much as liberals, and conservatives perhaps
more so when we challenge them to emulate our success with
small-government policies that they speak but don't really mean.

But I don't think this will be easy to stop. Libertarian
demographics being what they are, 20,000 of us in a small state will
be a huge concentration of technical, creative and
entrepreneurial talent. We'll found software businesses, studios,
innovative light-manufacturing shops and engineering companies
by the bucketload. We'll create favorable regulatory conditions
for old-line businesses like financial-services houses and for
bleeding-edge ones like the private space-launch industry.
We'll attract more people like us. The lucky state, especially
if it's depressed and mostly rural like a lot of the candidates, will
experience a renaissance. And we'll get to make the difference.

The real fun will start when Americans elsewhere start asking "Why
can't our state be more like this?"